LANGUAGE AND MIND
Understanding the functioning of the human mind has always been one of the most exciting challenges faced by philosophers and scholars over the centuries. In the last fifty years many cognitive scientists and linguists have studied the processes of learning and understanding language. As a result, a lot of research has concentrated on how children acquire and develop the ability to use language and to recognize people and objects. Nonetheless, the scientists who are engaged in the study of cognitive development continue to debate on a controversial and thorny question: to what extent is linguistic knowledge innate or learned? In the 18th century Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in his Critique of Pure Reason attempted to harmonize empiricism with rationalism by postulating the existence of a priori knowledge, (he coined the term "transcendental schemata" to indicate the innate mental frames we use to categorize experience), which is possessed from birth and precedes alla acts of perception.
Two centuries later, the linguist Noam Chomsky postulated the existence of a LAD (Language Acquisition Device), a genetic program in the human brain which provides us with a Universal Grammar. Chomsky questioned the ideas formulated by Skinner in his book Verbal Behaviour in which he claimed that whatever kind of behaviour, both human and non human, could be learned through the gradual reinforcement of certain stimuli. According to Chomsky, linguistics must be regarded as a branch of psychology and language as an innate faculty we possess from our birth. All languages present in fact a double structure: the "Surface Structure" varies from one language to another and obeys different sets of rules that govern pronunciation, word formation and sentence construction; the "Deep Structure" is the same in all languages and reflects universally valid rules. What emerges from the study of the deep structure (realized by means of logics and mathematics) is that, in the process of learning a language (be it English, French or Swahili), speakers follow and adopt common categories, rules and principles. Therefore, the purpose of linguistics is, according to Chomsky, studying the rules which allow speakers to generate valid sentences in their language, in other words, understanding how they construct and develop their linguistic competence. But is it sufficient to admit that the early development of language depends exclusively on our genes? According to the famous cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner:
Any innate Language Acquisition Device, LAD, that helps members of our species to penetrate language could not possibly succeed but for the presence of a Language Acquisition Support System, LASS, provided by the social world, that is matched to LAD in some regular way. It is LASS that helps the child navigate across the Zone of Proximal Development to full and conscious control of language use.
The ZPD is the distance between what children are able to do autonomously and what they can do only with the cooperation of somebody more expert and more competent than them. Thus, in the study of the human mind and also in the study of the early development of language, the dilemma nature vs culture/nurture cannot be solved by getting rid of one of these two factors, if we aim at formulating a coherent theory, which does not isolate language from its socio-cultural contexts of occurrence.
Nowadays there are several speculative hypotheses which try to shed light on the question of how, when and why language came into existence. Some researchers such as Steven Pinker and his colleague Paul Bloom think that the primate brain and the primate intelligence evolved (in Darwinian sense) in adaptation to the need to interact with peers in larger groups. Other scholars, such as the British-born American linguist Derek Bickerton, instead, argue that about fifty thousand years ago, our ancestors underwent anatomical changes both in their brain (it increased in size) and in their vocal system (it experienced a lowering of the larynx), two factors which might have contributed, in their opinion, to the evolution of the species-specific modular organ for grammar in the human brain. In addition to these conflicting speculations, there are those who think that speech must have grown out of gestures, others who argue that language started as vocal grooming and gradually replaced the typical grooming behaviour noticed in apes today.
Furthermore, the cognitive linguist Mark Turner has elaborated a further hypothesis in his work The Literary Mind. The approach he adopts in the study of the human mind is that of cognitive semantics, a sub-area of research of cognitive linguistics. In Turner's view the conceptual system underlying language is deeply rooted in our physical and bodily experience. The fact that human beings have a body, that they are capable of movement and of manipulating objects gives rise to a series of image schemas which lie at the basis of our conceptual apparatus. Drawing on George Lakoff's theories, Turner stresses how human beings continually tend to map source stories onto target stories, abstract concept onto concrete concepts in order to interpret and produce meaning. For example, every time we use expressions such as "I see what you are saying" or "His answer was clear", we are uncounsciously applying the conceptual projection KNOWING IS SEEING. Every time we say "Another year has gone by" or "Easter is approaching" we are activating another projection TIME PASSING IS MOTION and so on.
In Turner's view, it is the innate cognitive mechanism of parable which allows human beings to project one story onto another and which is the root of the human of the human mind - of thinking, knowing, acting, creating, and plausibly even of speaking (Turner M, The Literary Mind, Oxford University Press, 1996, p.168).
Recently, neuroscientists, biologists and linguists have started to collaborate with each other in order to deal with the burning problem of the origin of language. There are different methodologies that can be used so as to diclose the invisible activity of the human brain:
Recent studies have also revealed that FOXP2 ("forkhead box P2") is a gene that is implicated in the development of language skills, including grammatical competence.
V.S. Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and professor with the Psychology Departement and the Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego, and the Italian scholar Giacomo Rizzolatti have both emphasized the importance of the discovery of the mirror neurons which in Ramachandran's words could "help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments" .
USEFUL RESOURCES
If you are interested in the sensational discovery of mirror neurons, you can find a lot of articles on this topic at the following addresses: